Prize4Life was founded in 2006 by a group of Harvard Business School students shortly after one of them, Avichai Kremer, was diagnosed with ALS at the age of 29. After his diagnosis, Avi and his friends and colleagues decided to pilot an innovative new way to accelerate ALS research.

Prize4Life is a results-oriented nonprofit founded to accelerate ALS research by offering substantial prizes to scientists who solve the most critical scientific problems preventing the discovery of an effective ALS treatment. The Prize4Life concept is inspired by other prize awards for stimulating research, such as the X-Prize for commercial space travel and DNA-decoding, the U.S. government's H-Prize for hydrogen renewable energy, and Eli Lilly's venture, InnoCentive, which outsources R&D problems to a distributed network of scientists using prizes. Prize4Life aims to supplement and complement existing resources by attracting new minds, money, and media to the fight against ALS.

Why launch prizes for ALS/MND research?

Prizes will act as a beacon for all of ALS/MND research - attracting attention to some of the ALS problems most critical to discovering an effective treatment.

Prizes will help build a bridge between academia and industry, allowing the right academic ideas to be taken outside of the laboratory and commercialized for ALS/MND patients.

Prizes will help remove the largest impediments to industry's involvement in ALS/MND.

What makes Prize4Life distinctive?

Prize4Life only pays for results - the results that ALS/MND patients desperately need.

Prize4Life brings together existing ALS non-profits, academia, and industry - all working toward an ALS/MND treatment.

What do we offer prizes for?

Prize4Life, guided by its accomplished Scientific Advisory Board, offers prizes targeted at specific problems within the gap between academic research and healthcare industry. That gap, also known as the valley of death, is where the vast majority of ALS academic studies fail to become a product that can benefit patients.

Prize4Life awarded the $1M ALS Biomarker Prize in February 2011 to Dr. Seward Rutkove for the development of electrical impedance myography (EIM) which allows for a much more sensitive measure of disease progression.

Prize4Life awarded the $50,000 ALS Prediction Prize in November 2012 to three winners. First prize went to a duo from Stanford University, Lester Mackey, PhD and Lilly Fang, JD; and the team of Liuxia Wang, PhD and her colleague Guang Li from Washington, DC-based Scientific Marketing Company, Sentrana. Second prize went to Torsten Hothorn, PhD, a distinguished statistics professor from Germany.

The $1M Avi Kremer ALS Treatment Prize was awarded in April 2017 to Drs. Martine Barkats and Maria-Grazia Biferi, from the Institute of Myology in Paris, France, for their development of a gene therapy approach targeted at one of the most common known causes of inherited ALS. This approach significantly extends survival and slows disease progression beyond any results reported to date.

We are in the process of designing our next prize - stay tuned for more information!